>K'Breel was deposed and executed after his repeated failures in repelling the Terran aggressor. We don't speak of him. All hail mighty G'Ranee, Supreme Leader for Life!

LATE-BREAKING NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL: VICTORY!
The Council of Elders has confirmed the blueworlders' resumption of aggression upon our noble red sands. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thusly:
OKAY. Okay, so I'm K'Breel (even though anyone on Slashdot can assume the mantle merely by declaring themselves Speaker for the Council), and I'm late, but I'm merely chronologically late, not as in the Late Second Adjunctant to the Council Formerly Known As G'Ranee.

But domestic politics is beneath us tonight -- just take a glance at the blue world beneath us for a look at how bad that can get -- and let us focus on what's important: over the past sol or so, our Planetary Defense Force has been so good at pre-emptively distracting the blueworlders with tasks like landing comets, grabbing their prospective mates by their genitals, low-planetary orbit missions, and just general tribal infighting that we haven't had to shoot down any robotic invaders in quite some time. But when the opportunity presents itself, we take advantage of it, and so, we did. Hence the trivial elimination of yet another putative invader from elsewhere. We'd do it every day, except that the blueworlders lack the gelsacular fortitude to send us more targets. Now as to gelsacular fortitude, on to Second Adjunctant G'Ranee...

When a junior reporter pointed out that the destroyed invader was merely a technology demonstrator built on the cheap to see if a landing was possible, and that the blueworlders' actual payload was safely in orbit, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs launched into orbit alongside those of G'Ranee for a closer look.

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Republican congressional staff said in a report released Wednesday that previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it. The 25-page white paper is entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate and it does not provide any solution to the encryption fight. However, it is notable for its criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It also sets a new starting point for Congress as it mulls whether to legislate on encryption during the Clinton or Trump administration. "Lawmakers need to develop a far deeper understanding of this complex issue before they attempt a legislative fix," the committee staff wrote in their report. The committee calls for more dialogue on the topic and for more interviews with experts, even though they claim to have already held more than 100 such briefings, some of which are classified. The report says in the first line that public interest in encryption has surged once it was revealed that terrorists behind the Paris and San Bernardino attacks "used encrypted communications to evade detection."

The restroom problem is easily solved. Create one that contains nothing that could be damaged or destroyed by a cleaning process that runs automatically at regular intervals when the restroom is confirmed empty using motion sensors, heat sensors, etc. Since we're already going toward the single toilet with a door that closes model thanks to the transformers go ahead and put in 2-3 of those. Ceiling and wall mounted sprayers with cleaner/disinfectant/air freshener and and drying sequence. Big drain in the floor for everything. We'll probably see that in our lifetimes become a standard of a sort. Toilet paper disappears completely and everyone learns to live with a stream of cold water being shot at their asshole instead. Should be a lot of fun. Sink areas will have hand dryers that are water resistant but don't work anyway. Old people will sit around and reminisce about these things called paper towels.

Consider that menial tasks like sweeping the floor, bagging the fries, and flipping burgers merits nothing like $15 an hour. It's an entry level job in a world where staying at entry level for life is commonly known to be a bad idea. People not able to make it on minimum wage are doing it wrong. This is why the United States doesn't need to bring in (or allow in) any more unskilled Third World labor. There aren't even going to be enough entry level jobs for those already living here.

A lot of people always get fucked up. It's the way the world around us works. It is the way it has always worked and it's quite likely that it will always work that way. Something will replace fossil fuels before we ever reach the alarming states you're worried about just like something replaced that steam engine and all that coal it burned. Sure we still burn coal but not in the same ways and not nearly in as filthy a fashion as we did a hundred years ago. Have a little faith in the progress that got us this far. We're going to work it out.

I learned that in the police academy. I went into law enforcement almost thirty years ago but didn't stay in it. I injured my back at home and couldn't continue that career path. I remember though when capital punishment was discussed and how surprised people were to learn that it costs a great deal more to get a person into that death chamber than it does to incarcerate them for the rest of their lives. They also went over how the death penalty doesn't deter anyone at all. Almost without exception prisoners on death row state that the possible consequences of their actions never entered their minds while they were committing the crime for which they faced execution. It might deter you or I but then most likely wouldn't do it to begin with so it's sort of like preaching to the choir. It provides a measure or vengeance or retribution for the survivors and/or victims but it doesn't undo what happened or bring anyone back. The only justification we were given for the death penalty was that it serves as society's ultimate penalty. It is nothing less than the human race saying that you are no longer fit to exist among the rest of us and that society has chosen to rid itself of that person forever. I'm OK with this. I do think that people get so wrapped up in applying this ultimate penalty that they discount the really terrible experience that life without the possibility of parole can be.

Simple and effective, reusable and quite painless if the condemned is first sedated on a gurney with common surgical anesthesia. Do not allow witnesses to view the beheading. Simply allow them to see the body from the shoulders down. Allow him to say his final words, knock him out with the drugs, then wheel him into the device face up so that his head goes through the opening. Begin the countdown and then have a doctor pronounce him dead once everyone sees his body shudder as the blade drops.
Public spectacles were a mistake with the original guillotine and undermine it's simplicity and effectiveness.

Seriously. It's on the internet so it will never be what you want it to be. I can't speak for anyone but myself here but I'm at my most "sane"where anything online is concerned when I don't give a shit about it. Internet things are simultaneously incredibly important and completely worthless. The idea is usually important but as soon as you involve human beings in your holy quest to make a free encyclopedia or a free operating system or anything else you could do online for the betterment of well, "everyone" you bring in some life-crushing assholes who disagree with you. Note, you may very well be someone else's version of a life-crushing asshole. You probably are. You have to be able to walk away from it.

My 2012 MacMini is in much the same boat. It's plenty powerful for my (admittedly simple) needs. It can be upgraded though. Once I upgraded to SSD's and 16GB of RAM I've never had a problem with it's performance. Apple (or Microsoft) can't sell me something if I don't need it and I don't need a new computer. The last one I bought works great.

An anonymous reader writes: IBM said on Wednesday that it's giving everyone access to one of its quantum computing processors, which can be used to crunch large amounts of data. Anyone can apply through IBM Research's website to test the processor, however, IBM will determine how much access people will have to the processor depending on their technology background — specifically how knowledgeable they are about quantum technology. With the project being "broadly accessible," IBM hopes more people will be interested in the technology, said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing group. Users can interact with the quantum processor through the Internet, even though the chip is stored at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, in a complex refrigeration system that keeps the chip cooled near absolute zero.

An anonymous reader writes: A new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has attempted to define and investigate the subject of free will. By asking participants to anticipate when they thought a specific color of circle would appear before them, something determined completely by chance, the researchers found that their predictions were more accurate when they had only a fraction of a second to guess than when they had more time. The participants subconsciously perceived the color change as it happened prior to making their mental choice, even though they always thought they made their prediction before the change occurred. They were getting the answers right because they already knew the answer. “Our minds may be rewriting history,” Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The implication here is that when it comes to very short time scales, even before we think we’ve made a conscious choice, our mind has already subconsciously decided for us, and free will is more of an illusion than we think.

With all the noise about kids these days having to be handled with kid gloves maybe they're just hoping the extra year might make incoming students a little more mature, maybe a little more thick-skinned?